# InterHier: Learning Interconnected Hierarchical Semantics for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24026 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24026/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14940/) (2022)
- [Prompting Visual-Language Models for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04478/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary DETR with Conditional Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11876/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection with Attention-RPN and Multi-Relation Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01998/) (2019)
- [Towards Open Vocabulary Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15880/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we investigate the limitations of fixed, hand-crafted connectors in hierarchical semantic representations for open-vocabulary object detection. Existing methods establish semantic relationships between base categories and unseen novel categories by placing a fixed connector between adjacent super-/sub-categories. However, such fixed connectors may not optimally capture the relationships within a semantic hierarchy. To address this limitation, we propose interconnected hierarchical semantic representations (InterHier), which utilize a prepended learnable context to globally guide the interpretation of prompts containing hierarchical relationships. InterHier operates in two main stages. First, it constructs a hierarchy-aware prompt by integrating super-/sub-categories and prepending a learnable context. Second, it optimizes this learnable context to align visual region embeddings and textual embeddings. InterHier consistently improves performance over methods that rely on fixed connectors and can be seamlessly integrated into existing open-vocabulary object detection models. Experiments on open-vocabulary object detection benchmarks demonstrate that InterHier achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods.